Thoughts on Tarot Divination

I was asked (a while ago now) if I could put up a post on how I do divination. Looking back through my posts I haven't really said much about it even though, at least in my opinion, I use it pretty effectively. Now I also will say that a lot of the time when I'm looking for information I tend to call up spirits and ask questions directly. But one thing that I have found over the years is that unless you are communicating with an entity that is closely related to time, spirits don't actually see the future much better than we do. They also don't always have the best handle on the material consequences of interacting with the physical world, which is why you should always use limitations in your charges that rule out undesirable paths of manifestation for your injunction.

Since you can't ask a spirit something like what the overall outcome of an operation will be from your perspective, divination is the tool that you use to fill that gap. I pretty much exclusively use Tarot for divination, and I'm a Thelemite so I use Aleister Crowley's Thoth Tarot - no surprise there. What I like about the Thoth is that it lines up better with Crowley's Naples Arrangement of the Tree of Life, and also that it incorporates some specifically Thelemic concepts that I find highly meaningful in terms of my personal spiritual beliefs. I also really like Frieda Harris' art-deco-style drawings, basically because according to my personal aesthetic they just look cool.

And that whole looking cool thing is important. If you don't think the Tarot deck you're using looks cool, it probably won't work very well for you. That's because the Tarot is a tool that primarily makes use of your own psychic abilities to foretell the future and/or the real-world outcome of magical operations. As a human being, one advantage your consciousness has over that of a spirit is that it's more attuned to the physical world in general. This gives you a totally different perspective on the universe than anything you could conjure up, and generally that is the perspective from which you will get the best view of unfolding material events.

As an aside, if you want a good beginner reference for learning the Thoth Tarot, the best book out there is Lon DuQuette's Understanding Aleister Crowley's Thoth Tarot. Crowley's The Book of Thoth itself is one of the most comprehensive books on the Tarot ever written, but it's not really a beginner-level text.

At any rate, since you are more acquainted with the nature of your own consciousness than any spirit is likely to be, operating from your own perspective is also useful in the context of mystical operations. Contrary to what some magicians have told me, I know from personal experience that spirits - especially the more powerful and intelligent ones - can read your mind. But they usually don't really understand your mind. My its very nature, the consciousness of a flesh-and-blood creature is always going be at least somewhat alien to a disembodied entity - and in a lot of cases, very alien. This is why in many cases you have to be literal with spirits. They can read surface thoughts, but not necessarily the context or the full intent behind them.

The Occult Bitch Interview

Last night I chatted with Jaime over at The Occult Bitch about my Enochian books, Enochian magick, stuff I blog about here at Augoeides, and my take on magical practice in general. It was a fun conversation and you can have a listen here.

If you have questions after listening to the interview, feel free to post them in the comments and I'll do my best to answer them. Also, remember that comments are moderated here because of the ongoing spam infestation at blogger.com. So if your comment doesn't show up right away you don't need to post it again. I will get to it as soon as I can.

Mixed Field Tuning

Over the years I have experimented with various versions of "mixed fields" - that is, trying to tune ritual spaces with multiple Greater Pentagram and Greater Hexagram rituals. What I have managed to work out is that mixing elements or planets or signs does not seem to work well. My current model for this is that tuning the space is like taking a flashlight and putting a colored filter in front of it. If you cover the flashlight with a red filter and then cover that with a blue filter, you'll get barely any light coming through.

So as an example, if you perform a ritual where you are trying to use, for example, the GIRH for Mars and the GRH for Jupiter (chosen only because they match the flashlight example of blue and red), the first GIRH (Mars) puts the red filter over the "white light" invoked by the LIRH that precedes it in the operant field opening. Then the second GIRH for Jupiter tunes the red to blue - but the red has already filtered out blue. So little light, if any, remains and your ritual is likely to fail.

Where this doesn't necessarily apply is when you are combining a sign and a planet or a planet and an element. The elements, planets, and signs form complete systems of attributions in their own right and operate on different "levels" of magical reality. So you can use, say, a GIRH for Aries followed by a GIRH for Mars and wind up with a space tuned to Mars in Aries. Those happen to be about the same color, but that doesn't always hold and anyway it doesn't seem to matter.

What does matter with this method is the condition of the planet in the sign. You'll get a strong energy when your planet is dignified in the sign (Rulership or Exaltation) and a weak energy when the planet is debilitated in the sign (Fall or Detriment). Mars in Aries is a powerful energy because Mars rules Aries. The Sun would also be powerful because it is exalted in Aries. But Saturn (Fall) and Venus (Detriment) in Aries would both be weak. Jupiter, Mercury, and Moon would all be somewhere in between since they are neither dignified nor debilitated.

Exorcism Summit Open to Non-Catholics

Sadly, though, you still have to be Christian.

In a move that I imagine can only be positive for non-Catholic reverse-conjurers everywhere, the Roman Catholic Church has opened up its annual exorcism summit to exorcists belonging to other Christian denominations. By exploring techniques from other strands of their tradition, they hope to improve their methods and develop "best practices." You know, like a great big Agile team or something.

With a rise in reported demonic possessions and devil worship in the era of social media, the Roman Catholic Church opened its doors to non-Catholics for the first time during its annual exorcism training conference.

This article is from Fox News, so I want to interrogate some of its implied assumptions a bit. Is there really a "rise in reported demonic possessions and devil worship in the era of social media?" Members of groups like The Satanic Temple are atheists, and while there are theistic Satanists their numbers are much lower. "Lifestyle witchcraft" is not "devil worship" either - nor is it really even magick or witchcraft as I think of it, just a fashion trend.

I do realize that conservative Catholics think anybody who isn't a Catholic, and certainly anyone who isn't Christian, is basically a devil worshipper or might as well be one. But to be clear, I'm a Thelemite and I don't "worship the devil." I actually don't really "worship" anything. I work with deities and spirits as a peer, not a supplicant. And I have to say, in the occult community I don't think literal "devil worship" is much of a thing for the most part.

Also - has there actually been an increase in "reported demonic possessions?" I scour the Internet for anything that looks like a real case of possession so I can cover it here on the blog, and I can't say that I've seen any increase in reports over the course of at least the last decade and probably longer. It was rare before, and it remains rare now.

Colors For Kamea Sigils

One of the reasons there have been fewer Magick Monday posts up lately is that I am no longer sure what information I need to publish here. I've posted practical operations, initiatory rites, and a comprehensive model of how magick works that seems to stand up to the data I keep compiling as a practical magician. But I got a question from a reader yesterday about something that I have mentioned but not covered in as much detail as it probably deserves. The subject is how to use the four scales of color from Liber 777 when drawing sigils on the kamea squares for the various angels, intelligences, and spirits.

The basic method works like this. The four color scales represent the four Qabalistic worlds. King = Atziluth, Queen = Briah, Prince/Emperor = Yetzirah, Princess/Empress = Assiah. I'm not clear why Aleister Crowley decided to change Prince and Princess to Emperor and Empress in Liber 777, but that's how the scales are named in there and it can be a little confusing. It might have to do with the Aeon of the Crowned and Conquering Child, so the Prince becomes an Emperor or something like that, but it is also useful to point out that in the Thoth Tarot you do see Princes and Princesses rather than Emperors and Empresses.

Copenhagen Qabalah

I am sharing this for two reasons. First, because I want to make a record of the website archive link so I don't have to look it up every time I want to refer back to it, and second, because the material here had a lot of influence on the original magical practices that we developed for the magical working group. The website in question is Copenhagen Qabalah, which if you never heard of it or never saw it when it was up you should at least check it out. The site went down a while ago, but I managed to find the archive link that is included above. So I'm posting it here for reference.

In particular, the Copenhagen material had a lot of influence on how we did pathworking, which was one of the earliest practices that we did as a group. That in turn influenced how the "Rites of Approach" in my Path of Initiation articles work along with material from the Aurum Solis, Golden Dawn, and other practitioners. While I don't necessarily agree with every point on the site, I think if you compare it with what I have presented here on Augoeides it should be easy to track the various influences.

I posted our basic pathworking methodology here and here. What the Copenhagen material adds is the basic structure of the entire operation, in which you start at the bottom of the Tree of Life and work upwards. The sephiroth are visualized as "temples" containing the various aspects with which they are associated, and the paths are visualized as outdoor "landscapes" made up of elements from the corresponding Tarot card. To get to a path, you always begin in your "Temple of Malkuth" and navigate through the paths and sephiroth to get to your destination.

This practice (1) develops the body of light, (2) prepares you for more involved work with the "travel in the spirit vision" method employed by the original Golden Dawn and its successors, and (3) builds up a comprehensive "astral temple" that you can use for all sorts of operations that don't require an elaborate physical temple space. Using the operant field with this technique also allows you to do practical workings on the astral that will propagate effectively to the material plane. Microcosmically, it aligns the Tree of Life with your aura or field of consciousness, another key practice involving Magical Qabalah.

So this is a great resource for any aspiring modern magician working with the Golden Dawn or Thelemic system. I and my working group got a lot out of it, and I expect if you work with it your results will be good as well.

Click to Pray

In a new development that is literally about spiritual technology, last month the Roman Catholic Church launched a new smartphone app called Click to Pray. The app was covered by numerous media outlets, some of which considered it kind of silly. But as a practicing magician, I think the idea is good even if Christian theology is misguided on the idea of spells versus prayers.

Pope Francis launched an app Sunday called “Click to Pray,” which connects Catholics to a global network to share prayer intentions via their smartphones.

The pope opened the new app using an iPad during his Angelus address Jan. 20 and encouraged young Catholics, in particular, to download the smartphone app to pray the “Rosary of Peace” ahead of World Youth Day.

“Click to Pray” allows users to post prayer intentions and view other prayer requests in six languages. After posting on the social network, one can track how many Catholics around the world have prayed for their request.

The Android and iOS app includes the pope’s monthly prayer intentions, all of the mysteries of the rosary, and daily prayers for morning, afternoon, and night. In each of these sections, users can click a box to indicate that they have completed the prayer and view how many others also prayed.

This topic has come up here numerous times. Some Christians argue that the difference between spells and prayers is that prayers are devotional whereas spells are performed for some specific intent. That's actually a fair enough definition, and somebody who prays in an exclusively devotional manner might be doing mysticism but probably aren't doing magick. Theological issues pop up, though, the moment you start praying for something. That's when your prayer becomes a spell.

Planetary Work Updated

The planetary work posts have now been updated with new conjurations calling on the Intelligence and Spirit from Agrippa in addition to the planetary angel. This hearkens back to my older method of working down through the spiritual hierarchy, but with some changes based on my more recent better understanding of the distinction between paths and sephirah. You don't need to conjure the godname because you already have used it to tune the space, and only use it as a controlling name for the angel during the conjuration. Otherwise, the assumption is that Angel rules Intelligence and Intelligence rules Spirit. All three entities are conjured and called upon, and presumably will fulfill their appointed tasks according to their individual natures.

Eventually I plan on updating the figures to include all three sigils instead of just that of the angel, but the designs that are there now should work. Effectively, the angel's sigil acts like a "phone number" to access the hierarchy and from there you are calling on the angel to help you conjure the intelligence and spirit - which I have tested out. The updated artwork will show up eventually, but some of the pieces such as the sigil for the Intelligence of the Moon are quite complex. Knowing myself, I probably will put up the easiest ones first and save that Moon figure for last. At any rate, the conjured names here now match the intelligence and spirit names in Liber 777 for the paths and also the information in my original Planetary Magick post from back in 2011 which remains quite popular. Happy conjuring!

Revisiting the Intelligences and Spirits

When I put together my practical magick schemas for the planetary, zodiacal, and elemental work my goal was to standardize as much of the procedure as possible. I based everything on the success I was having with the zodiacal work such as what you see here in the monthly elixir rites and so forth. Those in turn had been based on a planetary series that we did years ago working with the planetary angels. None of those rituals called on additional spirits, just the corresponding angels, and they seemed to work pretty well. This was especially true when adding in components like offerings and additional devotional work.

I've been working with a lot of different ideas lately for revising the forms, and that requires more probability testing. This last week I was playing around with some of the new planetary stuff I've been doing and testing it against my older forms that included calling directly on the Intelligence and Spirit. What I found maybe shouldn't be surprising, but I found it to be such as the time. If you call in the Intelligence and Spirit in addition to the angel, your planetary rituals are significantly more powerful.

How did I not notice that? Three entities should be better than one, right?

Part of the issue is that I have continued to get better at magick in general. Nowadays I can do things with just the planetary angels that I used to have to go through the whole hierarchy of angel -> intelligence -> spirit to do. The rituals I did seemed to be working and I didn't notice any red flags. But going back to the older forms now, I have to admit the spells I tested worked really well, better than what I'm able to do these days with just the angel.

I also was influenced for awhile by the "project management" approach to conjuration which suggests that the entity you call on can itself call on any other entity that it rules in order to accomplish your charge. However, my latest set of experiments appear to show that this may very well not be the case. There's some nuance - it seems like you can use just the sigil of the angel to get into the hierarchy as long as you call upon the angel to help you summon the intelligence and the intelligence to help you summon the spirit, but I'm still playing around with that a bit trying to determine the most effective structure in absolute terms.

So I'm going to be doing two things based on this new information. First of all, I'm going to do more testing to see if I can replicate these findings. The other thing I'm going to do is go back through my planetary work posts and add the conjuration of the intelligence and spirit to that of the angel for practical operations. Also, if anyone else would like to play around with testing the differences, I'd be happy to answer questions so you can get going on it. Maybe this last set was a fluke, but I figure I'm going to go ahead and update the planetary work anyway because it's not going to hurt your results and it might make them better.

Check the planetary work posts later this week and I should have the changes to the conjurations in by then. And, as always, keep experimenting!

Regarding Magical Experiments

Over the last couple of weeks I have been asked by several people regarding differences between the work I publish here and the works of other authors, or differences between how I teach rituals versus how the various Golden Dawn groups or other orders teach them. While I would say that the majority of my work with the ceremonial forms is pretty much the same as the work done by Aleister Crowley, the original Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, and the Stella Matutina, there are some differences that you will come across once you start studying my work more seriously.

I make a pretty big deal out of the "operant field," the idea that you can increase the effectiveness of practical magick by combining a general pentagram banishing ritual (LBRP or Star Ruby) with and general pentagram invoking ritual (LIRH or Star Sapphire). Most current teachers will tell you to the banishing forms of both rituals together, a combination that I personally use sparingly. In my books, I attribute the angels and cacodemons of the Enochian Watchtowers differently than most other authors. And just today, I had a commenter ask about my non-traditional use of the rending and closing of the veil signs.

In each of those cases, I have answered the question the same way. I experimented with various attributions for the different ceremonial forms and stuck with the methods that worked the best for me. That's what I publish here, for the most part - techniques that have worked best for me the way I do them. Blindly trusting in traditional teachings strikes me as unwise. Magical and mystical realization may be incommunicable, but that doesn't mean spiritual technology is not like other technology. There should be a "best way" to do everything, and the advantage of doing practical magick right from the get-go is that it helps you find out what that "best way" is for you. That's the way I teach. Learn the pieces of tech that you need to make stuff happen, and then start making stuff happen.

The Secrets of Solomon

One of the really cool things about living in the Twin Cities is that the wonderful Joseph H. Peterson only lives a couple of hours away.

This last weekend, he came to Leaping Laughter Oasis in Minneapolis and gave a presentation on his latest book, The Secrets of Solomon: A Witch's Handbook from the trial records of the Venetian Inquisition. Peterson is one of the few authors in the grimoire field doing academic-quality research, and his books on the various texts and their histories are always illuminating.

I bought a copy of the book at the presentation and have not had a chance to read it, but I figured for today I would summarize a couple of takeaways from Peterson's presentation that are relevant to issues that keep coming up in discussions of the grimoires.

The Secrets of Solomon is a grimoire that is explicitly dedicated to working with chthonic spirits. It appears to be one of the sources used by the original author of the Grimoirium Verum, and it is clearly aware of the Key of Solomon. It positions itself as a grimoire for working with chthonics, whereas the Key of Solomon is dedicated to working with "aerial" spirits (which I usually refer to as celestial). Here are a few takeaways related to issues that have come up in the grimoire community that The Secrets of Solomon may help to shed some light on.

The text is clear that chthonic spirits are supposed to communicate visually, and aerial (or celestial spirits) do not. In other words, if you're charging up your Key of Solomon pentacles and trying to get the spirits to appear visually, according to the tradition you are doing it wrong. I doubt this is an absolute rule, and I also know from experience that the modern scrying techniques I use work fine, but it's a nice point to be able to pull out in those arguments over the whole visual appearance thing. It The Secrets of Solomon is to be believed, the celestials from the Key of Solomon don't necessarily appear and in fact are not supposed to.

According to the text, chthonic spirits can generally accomplish more than celestials. I can't personally say that I've found that to be the case, since I'm able to do about the same level of effects with both, but it's no surprise that the author of the text is going to say that the methods they are outlining are the best, whether or not that's true. The trade-off is that celestials can be "bound into a ring and carried with you" for performing ad hoc magical effects. This is an interesting idea for the Key of Solomon pentacles - what if you made a ring for one of the pentacles, enchanted it for general effects related to its function, and wore it around? It seems to me that could be a very useful technique.

Regarding Devotional Work

A commenter mentioned devotional work such as Liber Resh on my post about daily practice. I don't include Liber Resh or anything similar in that article because I'm not assuming everyone reading this is a Thelemite, and in my experience Resh is mostly a specifically Thelemic practice. However, devotional work like Liber Resh can be an effective part of every magician's daily work. This is a short article that I wrote up awhile back summarizing Aleister Crowley's Liber Astarte, which is his guide to uniting with a deity through devotion rather than the traditional methods of ceremonial magick.

Devotional practices are part of just about every spiritual system in existence. In the Eastern systems, devotional practices can have a similar function to meditation, but they accomplish the alteration of consciousness by cultivating the emotions rather than pure awareness on its own. Both of these methods are important in developing the capacity for transpersonal or macrocosmic realization, by which the most effective and powerful magick can be wielded.

Devotional methods comprise most of the spiritual practices of modern Christianity - or at least they should. In terms of daily life, Christianity teaches love and compassion toward others as an essential devotional method for realizing your interconnection with everyone else, and by extension the entire universe. Sects populated by Poor Oppressed Christians who teach hatred and intolerance provide no spiritual benefits to their membership, since exclusionary belief systems impede transpersonal realization and in effect prevent salvation.

Prayer is primarily devotional in nature, though people with enough magical aptitude can use it as an operant technique. If the devotional portion of the prayer succeeds in uniting consciousness with the transpersonal and the specific prayer is focused upon with enough intensity and single-mindedness, an effect will be produced in the material world that is analogous to a practical spell. This practice is in fact a simple form of magick, although magick is considered anathema in many of the Christian sects that use prayer this way.

Little has been written concerning devotional practices for ritual magicians. One excellent and comprehensive exception to this is Aleister Crowley's Liber Astarte vel Berylli, which outlines the basics of devotional mysticism and outlines a method for attaining union with a specific deity or constellation of energy through devotion. This article is a brief summary of the practice outlined there, but you can click the link to read the whole thing if you would like.

Secular Ritual Design?

Add a third box for "Consciousness/Probability Shift" and they'd be on to something

I recently came across this article from The Atlantic discussing the idea of "secular rituals design." On the one hand, it seems to me that some of the ideas being bandied about by this group might be useful for designing better and more efficient magical rituals, but on the other, from the contents of the article it sounds like these folks are entirely missing the point.

At the Ritual Design Lab in Silicon Valley, a small team of “interaction designers” is working to generate new rituals for modern life, with an eye to user experience. Created by Kursat Ozenc and Margaret Hagan, the lab crafts rituals for both individuals and organizations, including big hitters like Microsoft. The team’s website offers a Ritual Design Hotline with a tantalizing promise: “You tell us your problem. We will make you a ritual.” Meanwhile, its Ritual Inventory invites you to add any interesting ritual you’ve made or seen to its growing database. And its app, IdeaPop, helps you brainstorm and create your own rituals.

This is an interesting concept, but at the same time what's missing is a way of evaluating how these rituals work. That is, the point of a ritual is to transform some aspect of yourself or your environment that you are unable to transform by any other means. A good ritual has macrocosmic resonance, and should shift probability in your favor in such a way that it at least has the potential to fix the problem. The "user experience" idea, while useful in terms of ease and efficiency, is meaningless without an eye towards the change that the ritual is intended to produce.

Ritual Design Lab has its roots in Stanford’s Institute of Design, where Ozenc and Hagan both teach. In 2015, they proposed a new course on ritual design. To their surprise, more than 100 students signed up. Most were secular. “The interest was huge—so we thought, we should harness this interest,” Ozenc told me. “The new generation, they want bite-size spirituality instead of a whole menu of courses. Design thinking can offer this, because the whole premise of design is human-centeredness. It can help people shape their spirituality based on their needs. Institutionalized religions somehow forget this—that at the center of any religion should be the person.”

This is the kind of approach that could be useful from the standpoint of designing better spells and so forth. Also, the critique of institutionalized religion is accurate and well-placed. However, the whole point of (effective) religion is to (A) produce the experience of Gnosis or metanoia or enlightenment or whatever you want to call it and (B) employ spiritual forces to shape your external circumstances. I don't see any evidence of either in what the design lab is putting together. Which is a shame.

Workplace Voodoo Dolls

This week's magick post was The Office of the Readings, but I had to put it up on Sunday rather than today because we were doing the Invocation of Horus last night and I was announcing it as part of the post. So this is kind of a weird news post in that it is weird and I found it in the news. Still, I have some real magick thrown in at the end.

A recent study has found that voodoo dolls can have a positive effect on workplace morale. In particular, employees who took out their feelings of anger regarding abusive treatment by their supervisors felt less resentful about their work and performed better on cognitive tests. In particular, their feelings of injustice resulting from the situation in question were reduced.

Some 229 employees who participated in a recent study were asked to think of a workplace interaction that involved "abuse" from a supervisor or boss. As part of the study, some were then allowed to take out their job frustrations on a makeshift voodoo doll carrying their boss's name by sticking pins, burning it with candles and pinching it with pliers. OK . . . now I'm starting to get a little nervous.

The theory is that people (i.e. employees) who feel wronged sometimes wish they could lash out at their abuser (i.e. their boss . . . now just hold on a minute!). The study wanted to prove that giving employees the opportunity to take this anger out on an inanimate object is therapeutic for them - and potentially less painful for employers like me.

And you know what? It worked. A third of the study's participants reported "lower feelings of injustice" and said they were "far less likely to still feel bitter" about their supervisor. Not only that but they performed better on cognitive tests as well.

So let me just get this straight. There is a real study out there that shows employees can be made more productive by giving them a voodoo doll of their boss to abuse. That means employees can make a legitimate argument for bringing a magical implement into the workplace with official sanction from their employer. Sure, it's "harmless," but only so long as the doll remains magically inert and unlinked from any target.

This is interesting from a psychological standpoint because most studies find that "venting" or acting out anger is entire unproductive. It makes feelings of anger worse, not better, and makes the person more likely to act out in the past. The idea that anger is an "energy" that has to be "released" is one more piece of psychoanalytic twaddle that has infected our culture, but which has no scientific basis whatsoever.

My Latest Ritual Template

One of the things I do here in the Twin Cities at my local OTO body is run a Ritual Night workshop class every Tuesday night. It gives me a chance to teach the rituals that I post about here on the blog, and also to experiment with various ideas that sometimes make it into articles (if they're any good) and sometimes don't (if, say, they don't work at all). So this is probably a little underwhelming for my Magick Monday fans after the Path of Initiation series that I just wrapped up, but it is a handy document for anyone looking to construct their own rituals from scratch.

Ritual Night attendees keep asking for all of this information, so I decided to write up this short outline that shows the full structure for ceremonial operations using Aleister Crowley's versions of the Golden Dawn and Thelemic ritual forms. That way, I can just refer them here. I also am putting together a handout with the same information to give out tomorrow night. Note that there are reasons for why each piece goes where it does, and sometimes those reasons are technical enough that they do not need to be fully understood in order to start working with practical magick. In my opinion, waiting until you completely understand everything that you're doing is just one more way to put off the work. You can get good results from these operations long before your comprehension of them is complete, and your understanding should continue to deepen as you work with them.

Movie Review: A Dark Song

I rarely post movie reviews on here, since most Hollywood films about magick are hopelessly clueless when it comes to how it's supposed to work. Either it's this comic-book thing where wizards shoot beams of light all over the place, or something like Harry Potter where the magic is a bunch of fairy tale folklore mixed in with bits and pieces of real occult ideas and terminology. But A Dark Song, a new Irish horror film written and directed by Liam Gavin, at least puts some effort into trying to get it right. That alone is praiseworthy, hence this review.

The film stars Catherine Walker as Sophia Howard, a grieving woman who sets out to perform a fictional version of the Abramelin working. We'll get to that in a moment. It also stars Steve Oram as Joseph Solomon, an experienced magician Sophia hires to help her with the ritual procedure. Much of the film takes place just between the two of them, and both turn in excellent performances. The film manages to be creepy, suspenseful, and at a couple of points genuinely scary, and it accomplishes this without relying on a huge special effects budget or anything like that. The otherwise positive top review on IMDb complains about the low budget, but I have to say, I watch lots of films and I really don't see where spending a ton on effects would have made it much better.

The fact is that when you do real magick you don't see laser lights all over the place, or crackly energy like a plasma ball gone crazy. Magick is about doing the work, day in and day out, with all of that practice leading up to eventual success. The movie gets that completely right, showing the sustained effort and intent required to perform an operation that lasts for months. There's no "Hollywood magick" here, and I found the film better for it. There are a lot of misconceptions that beginning practitioners bring with them, and that sort of "shoot laser light" or "levitate feathers" nonsense is to blame for a lot of it.

So as a film, I enjoyed A Dark Song very much. As for the magick itself, I imagine that how I felt watching parts of the film must be how physicists feel when they watch movie scientists go on about how to solve whatever physics problem is driving the storyline. Much of the exposition is close to the real thing - much closer than in any film I have previously seen. It's refreshing to hear Joseph Solomon talking about how these are "real angels" and "real demons," and that those "people on the Internet" who say the Holy Guardian Angel is your "Higher Self" are just wrong. That's an actual conversation I see all the time. But many of the details of the ritual are misinterpreted, and some are just wrong.

Chart Victors in Planetary and Elemental Work

Yes, it's another non-Monday magick post.

In my Zodiacal Work series, I address the use of the Chart Victor to determine the best time to perform a zodiacal operation. Similar determinations can be made for both planetary and elemental operations, based on the dignities and debilities of the planets in the signs.

Most obviously, the best time to perform a planetary operation is when the Victor matches the planet called upon in your operation. This creates the condition of Rulership, the strongest dignity, since every planet effectively rules itself. But in fact, you can work out which dignity or debility is produced by each combination of a particular Victor and a particular planet, based on the condition of the planet in the sign or signs ruled by the Victor.

Rulership, when the Victor and planet match, implies competence and power. A planet in its rulership "has it all together," so to speak, so this is the best set of circumstances for performing any ritual. if you can perform all of your operations under Rulership conditions, you will get the best results. Exaltation is not quite as strong as Rulership, but it is still positive and can work well for performing rituals. An exalted planet commands energy and attention, so chances for success remain elevated, but is not necessarily entirely in control of its circumstances.

So in effect, a ritual that is performed under a Rulership condition will most likely manifest in a manner that you expect. It is less likely to "go sideways," meeting the conditions of your charge but in an unexpected or less useful way than you anticipated. A ritual performed under an Exaltation condition will work, but the odds of it working in an unexpected way is higher. Since Exaltation is a dignity it is unlikely to manifest in a bad way, just an unusual one.

Detriment is the opposite of Rulership, implying incompetence and powerlessness. Fall is not quite as bad as Detriment, though it should likewise be avoided if at all possible. Fall is the opposite of Exaltation. In this condition, the Victor might be able to hold the ritual operation together, but its circumstances are out of its control and it amass enough attention or energy to get much done. Basically, Detriment causes failure due to lack of coherence, and Fall causes failure due to lack of power.

Traditional and Kamea Sigils

No, it's not Monday. But this post is about magick anyway.

Twice in the last couple of days, I have been asked about using traditional spirit sigils versus deriving kamea sigils. For my elemental, planetary, and zodiacal work posts I have been using the kamea method, which (to my knowledge) was first published by Agrippa. At the same time, traditional sigils also exist for many of the same spirits that I am calling upon in those operations.

To be clear, the kamea sigils do not replace traditional sigils, or necessarily work better, or anything like that. Both the traditional sigil and the kamea sigil can be used to connect with the spirit, just like calling a person who has multiple telephone numbers. The advantage of the kamea system is that it is general enough to apply to any spirit, whether a traditional sigil is available or not.

There are even variations within the kamea method that can produce different sigils for the same spirit. In the Saturn installment of the planetary work, I include two possible sigils for Cassiel, as there is some disagreement regarding the traditional spelling. I have no trouble getting results with the version I use, but I expect that the other version likewise works for the magicians who employ it.

As another example, for the zodiacal work series, you can take a look at the Magical Calendar over on Esoteric Archives, you can find sigils for the same angels of the signs whose names I am mapping onto the kameas. Those sigils will work too, so you can go ahead and use them if you like them better. And this is true of just about any sigil, from just about any grimoire, that is attributed to the spirit with which you want to work.

The Chart Victor Calculation

So I went and changed my mind. I was going to kick off the Zodiacal Work with Aries this week, but since next Monday I'll be posting the text of my Introduction to Enochian Magick talk, I decided that I would post Aries the week after that so I can post all of the zodiacal work in an unbroken 12-week series.

If you are disappointed that Aries isn't up today, though, you can go ahead and take a look at my Angels of the Zodiac presentation from last August. I use Aries as my example, so the Aries post is going to look a whole lot like what I have outlined there, including the sigil on the Kamea and the selection from Liber 963.

Instead, I decided to go ahead and post the Chart Victor calculation, because I have found that knowing your Chart Victor is important when performing any sort of zodiacal operation. In Arabic, the Chart Victor is called Al-Mubtazz which means "the victor" or "the winner." This gets corrupted into English as "almuten," which is what most commercial astrology programs that perform the calculation call it. In simplest terms, for every given chart there is generally one planet that is stronger than all the others. That planet is the Chart Victor.

I originally learned how to perform this calculation from Benjamin Dykes, who found it in among the works of Abraham ibn Ezra. Dykes' book, The Search of the Heart, goes into great detail regarding the application of the method and includes never-before-translated astrological material from the Twelfth Century. This article will cover the calculation and briefly discuss its basic application for zodiacal operations, but if you want to know more I highly recommended picking up a copy of the book for yourself.

The magical application of this method for zodiacal operations has to do with the dignities or debilities acquired by the Chart Victor when it is in the sign with which you are working. Ideally, you want to perform a zodiacal operation for a particular sign when the Chart Victor is the ruler of the sign, or exalted in it. Rulership is the most favorable dignity, followed by Exaltation. You should always avoid performing an operation for a particular sign when the Chart Victor is debilitated in the sign by Detriment or Fall.

The condition of the Chart Victor should be examined along with the application of simple electional timing. That is, you should not perform operations on a void-of-course Moon or when the Moon's final aspect is a square or opposition. If that doesn't make sense, go ahead and review the electional timing article before proceeding further into this one.

Staring at Goats

This article is re-posted from my author website, from all the way back in 2010. The subject came up in the comments on my article from Sunday, so I thought today might be a good time to revisit it.

In Arcana the Central Intelligence Agency operates a top secret “Magick Office” that developed out of the remote viewing experiments that started in the 1970’s. Last weekend I saw the film The Men Who Stare At Goats which draws its inspiration from actual paranormal experiments conducted by the United States Army beginning in 1979. The film is based on a BBC documentary series called The Crazy Rulers of the World by Jon Ronson and his accompanying book from which the film takes its title.

This last week I tracked down a copy of The Crazy Rulers of the World and was surprised at how many events from the film appear in nearly the same form as they do in the documentary with only the characters fictionalized. As the opening quote of the film states, “More of this is true than you would believe.” Apparently this is indeed the case, and it makes the conspiracy theorist in me wonder if this is just the material that the government was willing to declassify what else might be going on. Could there really be a CIA or Army Magick Office?

One of the more interesting sections of the documentary, at least to a ritual magician like myself, was Ronson’s interview of Guy Savelli, the man who claimed to have stopped the heart of a goat through the psychic power of “remote influencing.” In the following transcribed section Savelli explains to Ronson how he did it:

“I picture a golden road going up in the sky, and I, because I’m Christian, I picture that the Lord is up there. And I picture myself walking up into the arms of the Lord and I picture His arms around me. And when He does it I get a chill inside of me and I know it’s right. So I did that, and I’m kind of asking for a way to knock this goat down.”

Savelli thus starts out with a godform assumption just like any ritual magician would. So far this sounds more like kind of a freeform spell than how psychic power is usually described by parapsychologists.

“So it comes to me that, probably, there’s this one picture that we have of Saint Michael the Archangel with his sword in the air like that. So I got that picture in my mind and I kind of sent it over with my mind to where the goat was. In my mind I pictured that Saint Michael got this sword and was going through the goat and knocking it down to the ground.”

So the resulting paranormal effect was accomplished by conjuring an Archangel! That’s magick, folks, and I’m willing to bet that if this really worked at all ceremonial forms would substantially improve its effectiveness. If I were an Army official who knew anything about Western esotericism and heard someone describe their powers to me in the way that Savelli does, the very next thing I would do is start rounding up funding for a Magick Office!

I suppose in the end you can never really can tell, since fiction does occasionally veer surprisingly close to the truth. But I’ll be as amazed as anyone if it comes out twenty years from now that sure enough, the Magick Office was for real.